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Weekly News Digest
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February 21, 2008 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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LexisNexis Now Exclusive Academic Distributor for Praeger Security Online
LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) and Greenwood Publishing Group (www.greenwood.com) announced a partnership in which Greenwood’s electronic product, Praeger Security International Online (PSIO), will be sold exclusively to 2- and 4-year college and university libraries by the LexisNexis Academic Sales Group. Designed to serve the needs of professors, researchers, and students who need quick and efficient access to reliable information on the world’s most important political, military, and foreign policy issues, PSIO combines expert commentary with the complete text of hundreds of print titles—and the easy access and comprehensiveness of a sophisticated online database.Updated weekly with commentary by advisory board members, expert authors, and researchers from Oxford Analytica (an international consulting firm drawing on senior faculty at Oxford and other major research institutions), PSIO provides in-depth analysis of security issues that threaten to destabilize our world. Expertly indexed and cross-searchable and featuring the complete text of more than 600 books, original content on important and regional events written by today’s leading scholars and experts, more than 1,000 primary documents, a worldwide chronology of terrorism events, and a carefully prepared annotated bibliography, PSIO is constantly evolving. It is intended for both distance learning and residency programs in homeland security, foreign policy, criminal justice, and business security. Source: LexisNexis
Vanderbilt TV News Archive to Deliver NBC Video
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu) and NBC Universal have formed a new partnership to provide streaming video access for students, researchers, and faculty at colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. This agreement allows the archive to deliver 8,800 hours of NBC news broadcasts in its collection of streaming video to subscribers to its online service.The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has recorded and preserved newscasts of the major television networks, including NBC, for almost 40 years. A provision in the U.S. copyright law provides legal protection to libraries such as Vanderbilt to record and loan physical copies of news broadcasts, but it does not allow online streaming. With this new agreement, NBC Universal grants Vanderbilt limited permission to stream its copyrighted material to colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. NBC Universal retains full ownership of content of the newscasts. Online viewing of the content through Vanderbilt’s service is intended for education and research; those interested in licensing of the content for commercial use will continue to work through NBC Universal. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a unit of the Vanderbilt University Libraries, is a comprehensive archive of news broadcasts of the U.S. national television networks. The archive began recording newscasts on Aug. 5, 1968, as a 3-month experiment. Its collection consists of a comprehensive archive of evening news broadcasts supplemented by selected special news programs. These include coverage of major events such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, Democratic and Republican political conventions held since 1968, presidential election coverage, the Watergate hearings, and many others. Source: Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Nstein Technologies Acquires DAM Provider Picdar
Nstein Technologies (www.nstein.com), a provider of online publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines, and online content providers, announced that it has acquired Picdar (www.picdar.com), a provider of picture and digital asset management in the U.K. Established more than 20 years ago, Picdar provides digital workflow and asset management (DAM) solutions to newspapers, magazine, and corporate publishers. Picdar helps 50 publishers such as Associated Newspapers, The Financial Times, Independent Newspapers, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Trinity Mirror, IPC, and Condé Nast steer into the digital age. Clients of both companies will now have access to a full suite of complementary solutions.Andy Heather, co-founder of Picdar and principal architect of the Media Mogul product suite, will continue to support local U.K. operations, as well as contribute to Nstein’s combined product strategy as VP of worldwide publishing. Lesley Steinitz, currently chief executive of Picdar, will now lead Nstein’s U.K. offices as director of operations. Jeff Carson, who initially joined Picdar as a software engineer, will continue to act as director of engineering and will be responsible for local development and technical services. Source: Nstein Technologies
USGENE on STN Offers Improved Timeliness
SequenceBase Corp. (www.sequencebase.com) and FIZ Karlsruhe (www.fiz-karlsruhe.de) have announced significant improvement to the timeliness of the USGENE database—to within only 3 days of publication by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). The companies claim this to be up to 10 days faster than any other comparable resource.USGENE now provides weekly updates on Friday. Weekly updates comprise USPTO issued patent data published on Tuesday, and published application data published on Thursday. Issued patent sequence data is therefore available within 3 days, and published application sequence data is available within 1 day of publication by the USPTO. USGENE is the resource in which to perform freedom-to-operate, prior art, validity, infringement, and competitive intelligence patent sequence searches within U.S. gene patent publications. USGENE is produced by the SequenceBase Corp. and is provided on STN by FIZ Karlsruhe as File USGENE (www.fiz-k.com/usgene). The database covers all available peptide and nucleic acid sequences from the published applications and issued patents of USPTO, from 1982 to date. Sourrce: FIZ Karlsruhe
Microsoft Utilizes ABBYY FineReader Engine for Live Search Books
ABBYY (www.abbyy.com), a provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, announced that Microsoft Corp. has selected its FineReader Engine software development kit (SDK) to convert the text from books to searchable electronic data for the Live Search Books project.Microsoft’s project is helping to bring together the world’s books into a collective, globally accessible and searchable archive. The scanning of book titles from a number of large library collections is underway, including the University of California, the University of Toronto, The British Library, Yale University, The New York Public Library, and Cornell University. ABBYY’s OCR technology has been selected for a series of high-profile book scanning projects, including the Gutenberg-DE Project, The Million Book Project at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the Million Book Project, an international undertaking led by Carnegie Mellon University. As part of its efforts to support library and book digitization projects, ABBYY developed a special version of its FineReader OCR software, called FineReader XIX, to recognize the elaborate "Fraktur" or "black letter" texts from the period between 1600 and 1938 and old European type fonts found in books printed in the 17th to 20th centuries. The special omnifont OCR system was first developed as part of the METAe project, a research and development project co-funded by the European Commission (5th Framework, IST Programme, Area "Digital Heritage and Cultural Content"). Source: ABBYY
Harvard Faculty Adopts Open Access Requirement
The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted to give the university a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit (www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html). The move is being hailed as a powerful message to the academic community.Harvard will take advantage of the license by hosting FAS faculty’s scholarly articles in an open access repository, making them available worldwide for free. The faculty member will retain the copyright in the article, subject to the university’s license. The repository contents can be made widely available to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Faculty members may request a waiver of the license for particular articles where this is preferable. The new legislation does not apply to articles completed before its adoption. The repository, which will be supported and maintained by Harvard University, will allow scholars and the general public from around the world access to scholarly works of FAS faculty. Source: Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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Brandi Scardilli
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